Sunday, June 4. 2017

This final announcement marks the deprecation of this blog in favour of our Discourse installation at community.chakralinux.org. From now on, you can stay up to date with Chakra by visiting its news category. The RSS feed is available here.

This blog, this final entry, and all other entries, will remain available until 2017-07-30 before being taken down, in order for this notice to spread. After that, traffic will be redirected to the news category.

This entry will not be imported to community.chakralinux.org, but everything else on here will.

It should be safe to answer yes to any replacement question by pacman. If in doubt or if you face another issue in relation to this update, please ask or report it on the related forum section.

Most of our mirrors take 12-24h to synchronize, after which it should be safe to upgrade. To be sure, please use the mirror status page to check that your mirror synchronized with our main server after this announcement.

Thursday, April 6. 2017

With the latest Goedel ISO release out, we can now concentrate on other tasks that our team has been working on for a while and we would like to share with everyone, together with all the latest Chakra news:

Lionel Félicité (deogracia) has provided a new Chakra mirror in France for our package repositories and ISO releases. We would like to thank him for his effort and support.

Our buildserver just got a significant boost of hardware and internet connection, we can't wait to make the most of them! We want to thank Dezponia both for hosting and providing the hardware and server setup for it, his help has always been vital for Chakra.

Chaoting (brli) has introduced a kernel and graphics drivers update in our testing repository, which includes a GLVND-enabled mesa package that does not conflict but works together other libgl providers, including the nvidia proprietary driver. There are some issues reported already and we do not plan to move this into stable unless all the problems and concerns have been tackled and tested.

Adrian (Gallaecio) is working on a tool to track and manage package group updates. This is an important tool in our effort to enhance the half-rolling model of our repositories and improve the experience both for our users and packagers. Through this tool you will be able to track the current progress of updates, check the packages involved, as well as see the order of the upcoming groups.

Luca (AlmAck) has been working for a while now on a long standing project, an automated tool for our buildserver based on AntBS. This will make packaging much easier and faster for our packagers and hopefully improve delivery time of upgrades, especially for larger groups.

totte introduced our new forum software, a closed beta for which is already running on community.chakralinux.org. We plan to use this as a replacement of our current forum, mailing list, wiki and news tools and we hope to soon make it available to everyone. totte has also already setup Gitlab, but we still need to migrate pending bug reports before we officially switch to it to host our code and issue-tracker.

Samir (Ram-Z), Chaoting (brli) and Luca (AlmAck) are working on finalizing package signing on both our local buildsystems and on Chakra's buildserver. This is important in order to improve the security of our packages and repositories.

Lisa (shainer) is working on setting up Anitya for Chakra to track when packages release a new version upstream and a revamped contributors page to share information on our team and the projects they are working on.

Last but not least, a shout-out to our packagers Francesco (FranzMari), gnastyle and Jeff (s8321414) for their continuous work in bringing you the latest updates of the applications in our repositories, as well as making new ones available for everyone to check out and enjoy!

If you are interested to follow Chakra's development process closer or get involved and join our team of contributors, make sure to check out the related links listed at the footer of this page. Your help is always welcome!

We are excited to announce today that our team of contributors has decided to gradually fade out the traditional repository system and start introducing in carefully designed steps all our applications as snaps. Snaps are specially crafted bundles of applications which also include libraries they depend upon. This means Pacman and Octopi will soon not be needed for installing your favourite applications as they will be just a click away. At the same time, our packagers will have less work to do so they will have more time to enjoy their favorite Steam games on Chakra.

Those of you that have been following Chakra through its 10 years history are aware that we were pioneers in experimenting with new technologies and implementations. We were among the first to ship modular KDE packages, support a single desktop environment and toolkit and of course release our packages in the unique half-rolling model which we continue to improve so we can offer the best experience to our users.

Another innovation we introduced several years ago were bundles. It was a way to ship and easily manage Gtk+ based applications on a system that was focused exclusively on KDE and Qt. We utilized a simple click-to-install GUI method that also made removing packages easy, maintaining your system clean of unneeded dependencies. However the technology available back then was still not mature, so integrating bundles with the rest of the system was always a problem and we unfortunately had to drop it after a while.

Yet much time has passed since then. New exciting solutions have emerged like snap and flatpak packages, backed by major companies and distributions. We have been considering and testing these technologies for exactly a year now, taking into consideration their advantages and disadvantages. As it was with bundles, snap packages make installing applications very easy. You simply download the package from the developer's website or a repository like uappexplorer, click on it and you are done!

We hope our users support this change and enjoy a new way of managing applications that we believe is the future.

Monday, March 20. 2017

It's only been days since our latest release Goedel 2017.03 was announced, but KDE software updates fully roll in Chakra and we could not delay this any further. As always, simply upgrading your system after installation will provide you with the latest available software in our repositories.

The most recent updates for KDE's Plasma, Applications and Frameworks series are now available to all Chakra users. All of these have been built against an important update of Qt to version 5.8.0.

The Calligra suite has also been updated to 3.0.0.1, so it is now fully ported to Frameworks 5 and will be provided as a single package. However this means that applications like author, braindump, flow and stage are no longer actively maintained and are dropped from our repositories.

Plasma 5.9.3 provides another round of bugfixes and translation updates to the 5.9 release, with changes found mostly in kwin, plasma-desktop and plasma-workspace.

Applications 16.12.3 ship with more than 20 recorded bugfixes and include improvements to kdepim, ark, filelight, gwenview, kate, kdenlive and okular. kdelibs have also been updated to 4.14.30.

Frameworks 5.32.0 provide the usual bugfixes and improvements to breeze-icons, kio, ktexteditor, plasma-framework and syntax-highlighting, among other packages.

gtk
pidgin 2.12.0
skypeforlinux 5.0.0.5: We now ship the bundled web application which unfortunately misses some features and lacks in system integration, but at least it works.

lib32
wine 2.4

It should be safe to answer yes to any replacement question by Pacman. If in doubt or if you face another issue in relation to this update, please ask or report it on the related forum section.

Most of our mirrors take 12-24h to synchronize, after which it should be safe to upgrade. To be sure, please use the mirror status page to check that your mirror synchronized with our main server after this announcement.

The 2017.03 release introduces two noteworthy changes:
- The installer, Calamares, has been updated to version 3.0.1.91. As a result, users are now able to install Chakra on btrfs and LUKS encrypted partitions. Calamares has received lots of partitioning enhancements and bug fixes since our previous ISO release and the installation process should be smoother than ever.
- Our homegrown Heritage theme for Plasma got a refreshing facelift that we hope you will enjoy.

This release also offers an updated snapshot of packages already available in our repositories:

KDE Software

Plasma 5.9.2

Frameworks 5.31

Applications 16.12.2

Calligra 2.9.11Core Packages

linux 4.8.6

xorg-server 1.17.4

systemd 231

qt5 5.7.1

qt 4.8.7

sddm 0.14.0

Drivers

xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.12

xf86-video-ati 7.7.0

xf86-video-intel 2.99.917+722+g714052f

mesa 13.0.2

nvidia 370.28 (plus 340.98, 304.132)

catalyst 15.9

We would like to remind you that:
- Chakra implements a half-rolling release model for the repositories, where all applications and KDE software fully roll. So expect newer versions of many of the above packages on your first update after installation.
- Current Chakra users do not need to perform a new installation, updating your current installation will always provide you with all the latest versions of all our packages.

We take this opportunity to thank everyone that has contributed to the Goedel release, we greatly appreciate all your feedback and support in making Chakra a better and more reliable distribution! This testing cycle was one of the most extensive in Chakra's history and took more than 4 months. However, some bugs are expected due to the many changes and new features introduced, so please take the time to report them on our issue tracker.

Have in mind:

To create reliable installation media, it is important to follow the wiki instructions.

The Calamares installer does not yet support RAID and LVM installations.

There are limitations in detecting hybrid cards. So even if you choose to boot in non-free mode, you will still be using the free drivers. To workaround this install using the free drivers and then switch manually. For Nvidia cards, you can install Bumbleebe.

Thursday, March 9. 2017

We are excited to introduce a refreshed version of our homegrown Heritage theme which will ship with the upcoming ISO release! In this update we have included subtle changes that we hope will improve the overall desktop experience for Chakra users.

As always, current Chakra users simply need to update their existing installations to receive the latest changes, there is no need to reinstall with the new ISO which will be released very soon. Just wait until your mirror has synchronized so you can upgrade to chakra-heritage-themes 2016.12.

A big thank you from all of us to gnastyle who provided many ideas and designs and AlmAck (Luca Giambonini) for implementing them, their work has taken Heritage to the next level.

And since it's all in the details, here are the most noticeable:

In the past, plasmoids had a different color than the panel. We have now unified the color to be more consistent. The panel became a bit more transparent, so that you can see the wallpaper or any other window in the background.
Old New

What is really new in the theme are the dialog windows: the application launcher, window previews and the system tray item popup. We wanted to use blur more and lighten up the theme. Therefore we made the dialog windows less black and more gray with increased transparency to absorb the color of the covered background. We really like the resulting effect and you can enjoy it in all its glory with a very colourful wallpaper.
Also the whole theme got some minor adjustments, like the elements of the system tray and the icon task manager.
Old New

We decided to replace the old custom icons because they were not very comprehensive. So we switched to the ones from breeze to increase the integration with the desktop.
Old New

The sddm theme has also been improved and is now aligned with the breeze theme.
Old New

We hope you like then new look. Of course Heritage can still be improved and everyone can contribute with ideas, mock-ups or patches to our artwork. Any suggestions are always welcome!

Tuesday, February 21. 2017

The latest updates for KDE's Plasma, Applications and Frameworks series are now available to all Chakra users.

Included with this update, is an update of the ncurses, readline and gnutls related group of packages, as well as many other important updates in our core repository. Be aware that during this update, your screen might turn black. If that is the case and it does not automatically restore after some time, then please switch to tty3 with Ctrl+Alt+F3 and then switch back to the Plasma session with Ctrl+Alt+F7. If that does not work, please give enough time for the upgrade to complete before shutting down. You can check your cpu usage using 'top' after logging in within tty3. You can reboot within tty3 using 'shutdown --reboot'.

It should be safe to answer yes to any replacement question by Pacman. If in doubt or if you face another issue in relation to this update, please ask or report it on the related forum section.

Most of our mirrors take 12-24h to synchronize, after which it should be safe to upgrade. To be sure, please use the mirror status page to check that your mirror synchronized with our main server after this announcement.

It should be safe to answer yes to any replacement question by pacman. If in doubt or if you face another issue in relation to this update, please ask or report it on the related forum section.

Most of our mirrors take 12-24h to synchronize, after which it should be safe to upgrade. To be sure, please use the mirror status page to check that your mirror synchronized with our main server after this announcement.

Friday, January 6. 2017

This announcement is also available in Spanish and Taiwanese Mandarin.
The latest updates for KDE's Plasma and Applications series are now available to all Chakra users, together with other important package upgrades.

Plasma 5.8.5 provides another round of bugfixes and translation to the 5.8 release, with changes found mostly in the plasma-desktop, plasma-workspace and kscreen packages.

Applications 16.12.0 is the first release of a new series and comes with several changes. kdelibs has been updated to 4.14.27.

1. New features have been introduced in many packages:

marble ships with a live day/night Plasma wallpaper of earth and a new widget.

kcharselect can now show emoticons and allows you to bookmark your favorite characters.

cantor gained support for julia.

ark gained support for file and folder renaming, as well as copying and moving packages inside the archive. You can now choose compression and encryption algorithms when creating archives and also open AR files, e.g. Linux *.a static libraries.

kopete can use X-OAUTH2 SASL authentication with the jabber protocol and the OTR encryption plugin received some fixes.

kdenlive has a new Rotoscoping effect, support for downloadable content and an updated Motion Tracker.

kmail and akregator implement Google Safe Browsing to check for malicious links and can now print documents.

2. The following packages have now been ported to KDE Frameworks 5, with new features introduced in many cases:

audiocd-kio

kalzium

kdegraphics-mobipocket

kdialog

keditbookmarks

kfind

kgpg

konqueror

kqtquickcharts

ktouch

libkcddb

libkcompactdisc

okular

svgpart

3.kdepim further split into new packages: akonadi-calendar-tools, akonadi-import-wizard, grantlee-editor, kmail-account-wizard, mbox-importer, pim-data-exporter, pim-sieve-editor, pim-storage-service-manager
If you want to install the whole kdepim group you can use:

sudo pacman -S kdepim

4. The following packages are no longer supported by KDE and have been dropped from our repositories. You should remove them from your system manually if you do not use them but happen to have them installed:

kdepim-common. In case this conflicts with another package (like kmail-account-wizard), it is safe to manually remove it with

sudo pacman -Rdd kdepim-common

kdepim-console

kde-baseapps-kdepasswd

kdgantt2

gpgmepp

kuser

In addition, the following notable packages have been updated:

[core]

qt5 group 5.7.1

mesa 13.0.2

llvm 3.9.1

gpgme 1.8.0

gnupg 2.1.17

[desktop]

kdelibs 4.14.27

qtcreator 4.2.0

[lib32]

winetricks 20161228

It should be safe to answer yes to any replacement question by pacman. If in doubt or if you face another issue in relation to this update, please ask or report it on the related forum section.

Most of our mirrors take 12-24h to synchronize, after which it should be safe to upgrade. To be sure, please use the mirror status page to check that your mirror synchronized with our main server after this announcement.

Friday, December 30. 2016

The Chakra contributors would like to wish everyone a happy, healthy and exciting new year!

We take this opportunity to share a big and warm thank you to all of you for supporting us, reporting bugs and providing great feedback, helping each other through our forums and wiki, maintaining our tools translated, donating and spreading the word about our distribution. Your help is extremely valuable to Chakra and greatly improves our distribution and the services we offer.

This is a good time to reflect on what we achieved in the past year and set our new goals for 2017.

We did reach several milestones in 2016, but unfortunately some issues remain open and will need our further attention in the new year:

Our Plasma 5 implementation has matured a lot and plasma itself has seen several enhancements in terms of stability and features. A new heritage theme created by AlmAck and gnastyle will soon be available to everyone with the release of our next ISO.

Many of the applications in our repositories have nowadays switched to Qt5 or Frameworks 5 based versions and new ones have also been added. Even more KDE Applications will switch away from Qt4/workspace4 with the upcoming 16.12 release, and those that are unmaintained will be dropped. We of course always aim at not breaking our users' workflow when possible.

Thanks to our packagers the applications that are important to the majority of users continue to fully roll and get updated. Kudos to brli, FranzMari, gnastyle, s8321414 and ugijka. Even though Gallaecio and shainer did a lot of work in the background, some of the less popular packages still need tackling. We also need to schedule and package some big group updates for the next year to improve the overall quality of our repositories.

Our website received a small face-lift thanks to totte, and we are very close at switching to new tools like Discourse and Gitlab to enhance our services and make everything easier both for our users and contributors. A reworked website is still in the plans for the new year.

Akabei is a work in progress, and lots of effort was put into it by AlmAck, shainer and Gallaecio. A public testing release is closer than ever.

Our buildsystem continued to receive improvements and future planning, kudos to Ram-Z.

chaser was introduced as a modern replacement for the CCR tool, kudos to Ryan.

The Beginners Guide wiki got an update to correspond to all the Plasma 5 and Calamares changes, kudos to tetris4.

2017 brings with it many new challenges and this time our aim is to focus on:

Increasing the times we all meet together to work and discuss on all the things related to Chakra. Even though we talk to each other everyday through the developer channels, holding some scheduled meetings is very beneficial. These could be either online through IRC or offline with future annual meetings.

Deciding a course of action and implementing it for the long standing bugs on our bugtracker.

Increasing the number of ISO releases from 1-2 to 3-4 per year. Chakra users always get the latest with an update of their system after an installation, but new releases increase visibility, fix issues related to outdated packages and help avoiding manual interventions.

Further refining our home grown Heritage theme for Plasma 5.

As you know, Chakra is delivered by a community of enthusiasts that enjoy working on it in their free time. We can't make any guarantees, but we will sure try our best! And all your help is welcome.

Friday, December 23. 2016

This update mainly consists of updates in our core repository, including the linux kernels and the graphics drivers, as well as several other important packages like grub, sddm and ffmpeg. Chakra gamers also get the latest version of steam!

In addition, the update to Frameworks 5.29.0 by KDE becomes available. A new prison package is introduced for barcode generation, and of course the usual bugfixes and improvements that are mostly found in kio, plasma-framework and breeze icons.

It should be safe to answer yes to any replacement question by Pacman. If in doubt or if you face another issue in relation to this update, please ask or report it on the related forum section.

Most of our mirrors take 12-24h to synchronize, after which it should be safe to upgrade. To be sure, please use the mirror status page to check when your mirror last synchronized with our main server.

Sunday, November 27. 2016

As you have probably noticed, this move took a while to reach stable due to the issues with our main server, which resulted in a downtime of 2 days for our website and all the related services. There was nothing we could do, since our hosting provider experienced a major subsystem malfunction. The website might be a bit unstable or slow in the following days until the issue is properly fixed. We can only apologize for any inconvenience.

But the latest updates for KDE's Plasma, Applications and Frameworks series are now available to all Chakra users.

Plasma 5.8.4 includes three weeks worth of bugfixes and new translations, with changes mostly in the breeze theme, kwin and plasma workspace packages..

Applications 16.08.3 include more than 20 recorded bugfixes and improvements to ' kdepim, ark, okteta, umbrello, kmines, among others'. kdelibs was also updated to version 4.14.26.

Frameworks 5.28.0 include a new syntax-highlighting package, in addition to the usual bugfixes and improvements, mostly found in kio, plasma-framework, kwidgetsaddons and ktexteditor.

Other notable package upgrades and changes:

[core]

kirigami 1.1.0 has been added to the repos, a QtQuick based components set

openjdk 8.u112

cpupower 4.8.6

curl 7.51.0

dkms 2.3+git161025

eclipse-ecj 4.6.1

graphicsmagick 1.3.25

inetutils 1.9.4

libxi 1.7.8

ndiswrapper 1.61

net-tools 1.60.20160710git

pypy 5.6.0

rust 1.13.0

scons 2.5.1

sddm 0.14.0

tzdata 2016i

[desktop]

choqok 1.6.0

kdevelop 5.0.2

qtcreator 4.1.0

[gtk]

hugin 2016.2.0

[lib32]

wine 1.9.24

winetricks 20161107

It should be safe to answer yes to any replacement question by Pacman. If in doubt or if you face another issue in relation to this update, please ask or report it on the related forum section.

Most of our mirrors take 12-24h to synchronize, after which it should be safe to upgrade. To be sure, please use the mirror status page to check that your mirror synchronized with our main server after this announcement.

Saturday, November 19. 2016

We are separating the update of these packages from the rest that will follow because changes in their packaging means that their update needs to be handled manually by users. You can expect two more announcements very soon, one for the latest KDE Plasma, Applications and Frameworks and another about core package updates, including the linux kernel and graphics drivers.

cups 2.1.4-3

In order to be able for users to add and remove printers without needing root rights, we had to add a new lpadmin group. This means that after the upgrade you now have to add your user to this new group manually in order to get cups working again (replace USERNAME with your user's username):

We changed the upstream source from Google Chrome to Adobe, so the upstream packaging changed. You will receive a warning about files existing on the filesystem when trying to upgrade. To workaround this please update this package separately by doing:

It should be safe to answer yes to any replacement question by Pacman. Most of our mirrors take 12-24h to synchronize, after which it should be safe to upgrade. To be sure, please use the mirror status page to check that your mirror synchronized with our main server after this announcement.

Applications 16.08.2 include more than 30 recorded bugfixes and improvements to 'kdepim, ark, dolphin, kgpg, kolourpaint, okular, among others'.

Frameworks 5.27.0 include a new set of mimetype icons, in addition to the usual bugfixes and improvements.

Other notable package upgrades and changes:

[core]

plasma-workspace now provides by default the ksuperkey package functionality.

php 7.0.11. The 5.6 series is now provided as php56.

gconf has been introduced as a dependency of plasma-pa.

intel-ucode 20160714

laptop-mode-tools 1.70

openssl 1.0.2.j

rust 1.12.0

filesystem 2016.09

gnutls 3.4.15

lua 5.3.3

vim 8.0.0045

[desktop]

libreoffice 5.2.2

kexi 3.0.0, now ported to Frameworks 5. If you get a warning about files already existing on the filesystem, please follow our FAQ documentation.

mpv 0.21.0

wireshark 2.2.1

nmap 7.30

[gtk]

filezilla 3.22.1

[lib32]

steam 1.0.0.53

wine 1.9.21

q4wine 1.3.3

It should be safe to answer yes to any replacement question by Pacman. If in doubt or if you face another issue in relation to this update, please ask or report it on the related forum section.

Most of our mirrors take 12-24h to synchronize, after which it should be safe to upgrade. To be sure, please use the mirror status page to check that your mirror synchronized with our main server after this announcement.

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